In recent years, the construction of the overtrack building complexes including offices, schools, residences, stores, and restaurants above metro depots has increased in China. Train-generated vibration transmits through ground columns into and across transfer structures into the building’s columns and upper floors. The vibration has the potential to impact people’s quality of life, work in office buildings, and the proper function of vibration-sensitive equipment in laboratories. An efficient computational model has been developed that characterizes the dominant mode of vibration transmission through each structural element including those in transfer structures in building designs where ground and building columns are not aligned. Impedance matrices are combined for the elements along the transmission path from inputs at ground columns with axial wave transmission into the transfer structures’ girders and beams with bending wave transmission and the building columns with axial wave transmission. Floors are characterized by point input impedances. Model inputs are vibration levels at ground column bases during train pass-bys. Model predictions were compared with measured vibration levels within a 4-story overtrack building on a transfer structure in the Qianhai depot in China. The agreement between predicted and measured vibration levels was quite good. The proposed model can be used to accurately predict overtrack vibration levels for buildings supported on a transfer structure with a small computational cost in order to identify potential vibration concerns prior to construction.

Environmental noise and vibration induced by building construction are increasingly prominent in daily life. If the noise and vibration level exceeds the corresponding standard limits stipulated by the country, humans’ normal life, working, or studying efficiency would be interfered. This paper aims to explore how residents respond to noise and vibration mainly induced by the building construction. The noise and vibration measurements, as well as a questionnaire survey, were conducted. Through analysis and comparisons, it is shown that the noise impacts were concentrated in the area near the construction site. For the noise and vibration transmission within the building, the noise levels were amplified in the lower floors and gradually attenuated with floors, and the vibration levels decayed with the floors. The noise impact was much greater than the vibration impact. Building construction was found to be one of the most annoying noise and vibration sources, while the subway operation has little impact on residents according to either subjective or objective evaluation. The ratio of noise and vibration dissatisfaction was less than that of annoyance, which demonstrated that the residents’ psychological capacity was high toward the impact of noise and vibration. The proposed dose-response relationship can apply in a similar community environment. Once the noise levels within the building obtained, the residents’ noise annoyance can then be estimated.